In today's world of hyperbole it's easy to lose sight of reality. Jon Lester's recent no-hitter for the Boston Red Sox (my beloved team) is a victim of sports writers across the nation who are looking to hype a story.

The facts are that Lester is a good guy who less than 2 years ago got dealt a bad hand with anaplastic large cel lymphoma. The good news is that it's one  of the few truly treatable forms of cancer and that he had the resources to receive early detection and top-quality treatment. He's a cancer survivor, but not quite in the way that a woman having undergone a double mastectomy is a cancer survivor. Lester was lucky.

If we want to call his no-hitter "heroic" as so many professional sportswriters and broadcasters have done, then let it be that way because no-hitters are rare at any level of baseball. But if someone is going to call it heroic because he is a cancer survivor, then that's ridiculous. His cancer was detected early and it's not like he had a tumor that affected the stability of his bones (e.g. an osteosarcoma).

If he had metastatic cancer that had traveled to his brain and during treatment had pitched at all, I would call that heroic. If he had an incurable form of a fast-growing cancer and pitched a no-hitter, I would label that as super-heroic. But that's not the case. He was a bit unlucky but still far luckier than most.

Let's save the word "heroic" for the firefighters who pull people out of burning buildings, for the troops who risk their lives daily in a country for people they don't even know, for the parents of kids with severe disabilities who sacrifice everything for their childern, and for the Tibetans who continue despite being repressed to great lengths. Those people risk their lives and their health for a greater good. That's as good a definition of heroic as I know. Pitching a no-hitter - cancer survivor or not - does not qualify for "heroic" status.